This fine retrospective reveals the late American painter's psychological
turbulence, says Alastair Sooke

One day in late 1961, the American painter Agnes Martin was found in a catatonic state wandering New York’s streets. She was admitted to hospital and diagnosed with schizophrenia, which intermittently afflicted her until the end of her life.

Among specialists, it isn’t kosher to speculate about an artist’s work in the light of his or her biography. But in the case of Martin, knowledge of her mental illness legitimately transforms our understanding of her paintings.

I had always considered her classic, proto-Minimalist pictures from the Sixties – characterised by subtle, ghostly colours and the use of minute elements repeated within a grid often drawn onto a square canvas with a pencil – as ascetic and restrained: the epitome of cerebral self-control.

Yet Tate Modern’s immaculate retrospective, the first substantial show of her work since her death in 2004, suggests something different – and revelatory. Here, her large yet intricate works of art appear so preoccupied and intense that they seem to have emerged out of Martin’s sense of psychological turbulence within.

As a consequence, her paintings, which at first can appear impersonal or even mechanical, become that much more human and involving. Martin’s cool geometric abstractions are butterfly nets for emotions.

Born on the Canadian prairie, she turned to art relatively late, aged 30, when she was a student at Columbia University in New York. During the Fifties, her paintings were in dialogue with Modernists such as Klee and Miro.

Untitled (c. 1955) is full of floating “biomorphic” forms. A tapering black oval at the bottom could be a vagina, while a fast-brushed star at the top recalls Picasso’s painted shorthand for an intimate part of a lover’s anatomy. Another untitled work from the same period containing more lyrical, spindly forms owes a debt to the Abstract Expressionist pioneer Arshile Gorky.

Agnes Martin, 'Untitled', 1959 (Image: Des Moines Art Center, Iowa)

But then Martin, who’s often considered the pivot between Abstract Expressionism and the newer tendency of Minimalism, moved into a sail-maker’s loft in a run-down district of Lower Manhattan. There she fraternised with a younger generation of artists including Jasper Johns, Ellsworth Kelly, and Robert Rauschenberg – and her work changed.

She made sculptural assemblages using found objects such as boat spikes and bottle tops. Burning Tree (1961) is a chandelier-shaped piece of branching, metal-tipped wood that looks like a Viking’s helmet.

She also started to experiment with geometric shapes and repetition. Buds (c. 1959) could be a Damien Hirst spot painting. The Heavenly Race (Running) looks like a stripped-back diagram of a shingle roof, but it also evokes an angel’s feathery wing.

As the Sixties dawned, Martin alighted upon her mature style, constructing compositions around a hand-drawn grid. Often these works are beautiful: Friendship (1963), a large panel of gold leaf incised to produce a grid of tiny shimmering rectangles, is as sumptuous as a wall of religious icons.

Morning (1965) involves two subtly offset grids, one drawn in graphite, the other in red pencil, against white. The effect is surprisingly glorious, as the hint of red evokes the first blush of dawn. Like a lot of Martin’s work, it is at the same time quiet and luminous, pale yet radiant.

Crucial to its impact is the tremulous quality of the grid’s lines. If they were truly, mechanically straight, then the picture’s vital spark of human feeling would be lost.

This is also the moment when Martin’s concentrated process seems most redolent of angst. A Grey Stone (1963), for instance, has the painstaking, obsessive quality of what we now call “outsider art”. Its relentless pattern owes a debt to folk art such as Native American textiles.

More than this, though, when you actually consider how it was made – by individually positioning each minute blob, dab and lozenge of grey paint within every minuscule cell of a vast grid – it seems like the sort of repetitive, even absurd, endeavour that would appeal only to someone in a distinctly unsettled frame of mind.

It reminded me of the obsessive white “infinity nets” produced in New York around the same time by Yayoi Kusama, another artist who suffered from mental illness.

In other words, the Zen-like tranquillity of Martin’s Sixties work appears to be hard-won, coming at the expense of significant psychological distress. The seeds of Minimalism – that seemingly most rational of 20th-century art movements – contained a strikingly irrational germ.

This also helps to explain a fundamental aspect of much of Martin’s work – including the pictures of horizontal stripes that she began to produce in New Mexico after a self-imposed break from painting in the late Sixties.

Take the striped paintings in faded pastels of the Seventies, which look like chic, sun-bleached beach towels tacked to the wall, or The Islands, a spellbinding series of 12 rich-and-creamy “white” paintings from 1979... Often, with Martin’s major works, there appears to be a hazy mist between their surfaces and us.

Her paintings are like residues of things that were once much clearer and more resolved. They function like visual memories: traces of perturbed states of mind that have now passed.

Yes, Martin was the mistress of serenity and contemplation – but the tranquillity of her art represents the calm following a storm.